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By Root 101 0

tonight’s lineup. The ska band has been playing for hours. They’ve already run through every song they know and are now playing each one a second and third time. Sometimes they sing in Czech, sometimes in English, and sometimes in something in between. The old Czech woman working the coat room is wearing ear plugs and complains that she can still hear the music. Tables line the room’s margins but they’re empty save for spilled shot glasses, half-empty beer steins, full ashtrays, and coats and sweaters shed by the crowd, who swing and bounce on the dance floor as if they’ve never heard these songs before, as if the night is just beginning and the set has just begun.

It’s impossible to get a drink. There is no bar, just a long hallway leading to an off-limits kitchen. Anyone desiring a drink must stake out the hallway, lie in wait for the club’s single waiter to emerge from behind the kitchen door, and then plead with him to take their order. It helps to slip him an advance tip— there are one hundred thirsty people and only one of him. The situation has aroused in the waiter an aggressive strain of apathy native to Prague’s overcrowded bars and restaurants. He gives no indication of being able to hear as he presses on with his full tray into the sweat- and smoke-infused air to deliver the last supplicant’s drink order, which will be half-spilled by the time it reaches its destination. This is no longer a room in which objects remain upright or stationary: the lead singer is leaning into the microphone at an acute angle that doesn’t acknowledge the laws of gravity; in front of the stage, a couple determinedly waltzes to the ska beat; beside them a knot of young Czechs spin on axes determined by innumerable pints of beer and shots of Becherovka.

When the band finally stops there is a melee at the coat check. Everyone pushes into the counter at once: in the absence of music, relocation to some place where the night isn’t yet over becomes imperative. The old woman tosses coats indiscriminately across the counter, as eager to be done with their owners as they are to be with her. Down the street is another bar, but it’s too jam-packed to allow anyone else through the door; and so it’s on to an old mill that has been converted into a bar that can only be reached by crossing a small wooden footbridge over the very Vltava tributary that flooded the place three months earlier. Inside it’s crowded but mellow. People lie on couches and smoke joints through white plastic straws. According to the sign on the door the bar closed two hours ago, but drinks are still flowing and no one seems in any hurry to leave. A dog wanders from couch to couch. It is unclear whether he belongs to the bar, to a patron, or whether he just wandered in. He is greeted at each couch with smiles and outstretched hands. Occasionally a drink is placed before him, but he’s a teetotaler who only accepts potato chips. After the mill, the remainder of the night’s bars become a seamless blur: the labyrinthine cellar with rooms only large enough to hold one table each; the basement pub in which the smoke is an impregnable curtain obscuring rough wooden picnic tables; the tiny dive where the DJ takes up half the space, leaving no room to dance. When there are no bars left, it’s time to go home. It is time to wait for the night tram.

All cities express day and night versions of themselves. By day Prague is tightly contained. Its streetcars fill with responsible citizens who inhabit discrete pockets of space. Conversations are muted. Carefully composed faces glance out windows or stare straight ahead. Old ladies claim seats with imperious authority; and if a car is full, a seat is made available, not just because it’s polite but because Prague’s grandmas are the arbiters of the city’s daylit hours. Their censorious faces attest whether a man’s coat is too bright, or a woman’s skirt is too short, or a student’s behavior so unacceptable that even before she has exited the car she has ceased to exist, having been forcibly exorcised by a granny’s gruff gaze.

By day the city